Medieval

I’ve been offered a place on the MA English Literature at Bangor and if I go ahead with it I intend to focus on medieval literature this time.

I’m currently reading The Book of Margery Kempe, the first English autobiography, dictated by a woman. It concerns religious experiences and the conflicts Margery had with people who believed she was inspired by the devil. It’s a repetitive work; Margery spends most of it sobbing in religious ecstacy.

I’ve also been reading Ian Mortimer’s The Time Traveller’s Guide to Medieval England, an enthralling book that thrusts the reader into the smells, tastes, sounds and clothes of the period.

 I recently enjoyed Umberto Eco’s The Name of the Rose, which I’d always thought would be dull and pretentious as he’s a pas de hors-texte type, but it was great fun (Sherlock Holmes in a monastery with intellectual bits).

Partly due to my medieval obsession, I’m attempting to teach myself Latin with the Cambridge Latin Course and Latin Via Ovid, and am finding the language bizarrely addictive.

To return to the twenty-first century, I recently joined Bangor’s Cellar Writing Group. I found the group very friendly, welcoming and inspiring, and am already looking forward to next month’s meeting.

Sophie at Stratford

Last month I payed my first visit to the birthplace of the Bard. When we got off the train we were greeted by Morrison’s and a construction site, which wasn’t quite the image I’d had in mind! However, things got better as we visited his grave in Holy Trinity Church…

…followed by lunch at the Dirty Duck. The curry tasted exactly like something I’ve eaten in Wetherspoons for half the price, but wonderfully gloomy Macbeth quotations adorned the walls so I forgave them. Then on to Shakepeare’s birthplace…

… where we learnt that Elizabethans never lay flat on their backs in bed in case the devil thought them dead and carried them off. Then to Hall’s Croft, with its herb garden and interesting old medical books, and Nash’s House / New Place, where I stole a twig from the clone of Shakespeare’s mulberry tree.

I bought a pocket Sonnets, which I read straight through (the version I had as an undergraduate was so heavy with notes I only got to about Sonnet 14). It reminded me of the pale perfection of Greek architecture, but then the dark lady comes in and turns the world topsy-turvy. I suspect the same woman inspired his Cleopatra.

I’m also reading an ebook about Anne Hathaway, Shakespeare’s Will by Meredith Whitford, so it’s been a very bardly month!

Better late than never

Two and a half years ago I had a poem accepted by Global Tapestry Journal. I’d seen a call for submissions in the back of Mslexia, where I found most things at that time – competitions, nail clippings, my house keys. My complimentary copy of  Global Tapestry Journal finally arrived last month, with a sweet hand-written letter by Dave Cunliffe. It’s a beat magazine. Worth the wait? The editor was prosecuted for his poetry in the sixties, man. Of course it was worth the wait!

I also have a poem in the latest issue of The New Writer, one in the Writelink Spring Fever anthology, one in the Leaf ‘Wales’ anthology Away Too Long, and some poems and pieces of flash fiction in the Earlyworks Press anthology Sky Breakers.

I’ve been reading poetry as usual. Annie Freud’s latest collection The Mirabelles was a frivolous indulgence, tasty but not as delicious as The Best Man That Ever Was. I’ve also been reading Zoe Skoulding’s Remains of a Future City, a themed collection about the transience of buildings, and Gwyneth Lewis’ Keeping Mum, which concerns the Welsh language and psychiatry.

It’s been floating through my mind to write a historical novel set in the troubadour period, so I’m reading texts from that time in order to familiarise myself with the attitudes and lifestyle. It seems like a mammoth task, but an adventure! I’ve been reading troubadour poetry and troubairitz (female troubadour) poetry and am currently attempting to plough through the Roman de la Rose. I read Marie de France a while back. Andreas Capellanus’ The Art of Courtly Love, Heloise and Abelard’s letters and Chretien Troyes’ Arthurian Romances are giving me significant stares from my book pile.

What else… I won the Monthly Challenge on the Earlyworks Press forum in September, my prize for which was Mark Rickman’s novella Crazy Bear. I read it in one gulp while in bed with flu - a great comfort read, full of humour and with an unforgettable flawed hero who somehow manages to hold our sympathy.

I went to Poetica at Bangor’s Blue Sky Cafe last week – my first real experience of performance poetry. Manchester’s superhero of slam, Dominic Berry, performed among others. It was great fun – stand-up comedy, acting and poetry rolled into one. The acting/poetry combination reminded me (don’t laugh) of Shakespeare. I went home thinking, how was it that once a poet could be accessible, profound and entertaining all at once? Why is it that poems by ’serious’ poets nowadays are fine on the page (sometimes) but at readings leave you thinking, ‘What the hell was that one about, and was it chord or cord he meant?’

The Flavour of Parallel by Nigel Humphreys

The Flavour of Parallel by Nigel Humphreys, paperback, pp. 71, Arbor Vitae Press, £7.99

Nigel Humphreys’ second poetry collection portrays those fleeting moments of consciousness which usually slip by without being enunciated, like the ‘bow bolt flash’ of a woodland fish. It presents reactions to art, music and places, as well as musings about the mystery of existence.

The poems are complex: as I read, two or three interpretations often revolved in my mind. Yet the strange, spiky precision of the images renders them instantly enjoyable – ‘fag packets leafing the beds’, ‘weighing each ingot of breath’, ‘a salmagundi of medieval roofs’, a dragonfly’s ‘hairgrip-picklock legs’.

The wide-ranging language creates a sense of sharp focus; in places, humour. The poems surprise by juxtaposing words from different cultures and contexts, from scientific terminology to contemporary slang. We encounter quarks and pheronomes, iridescence and opulence, samaras and schadenfreude, a flash git and shits who blanked Coleridge.

The tone is often empathic – ‘I chase his vision and track its hunger to the limits of scrub / -land and the chapel ruin’. Yet alongside soaring imagination is a recognition that transcendence has its limits:

     that the music’s waves
     never quite tower enough
     to drown the sentient me

In ‘Catedral de la Almudena, Madrid’, the poet’s spirit, given wings, ‘rebounded / cowed like a miner’s canary’. It’s an experience I’ve had many times, but never thought to put into words.

Limitation is also stressed in poems about our knowledge of the universe. While particle science brings us to an ‘irrelevant conclusion’, the agnostic poet can only envy religious faith that could ‘wrap’ the spirit ‘in hide against the Ice Age / of creature finity’.

The Flavour of Parallel deserves to be read and re-read, both for its original descriptions and the sensitivity with which it explores human experience.

Into the Yell by Sarah James

Into the Yell by Sarah James, paperback, pp. 82, Circaidy Gregory Press, £7.99

Into the Yell is Worcestershire-based poet Sarah James’ debut collection. In the opening poem, ‘Welcome to the Zoo’, Sarah James compares the poet to a flee:

            I borrow other lives, try them for taste;
            sip, suck, guzzle – then move on as I like.

In poems packed with metaphors, Sarah James ‘borrows’ various characters, some afflicted, some surreal. Into the Yell addresses contemporary issues, from mothers ‘preening their perfection’ at the school gates to global catastrophe leaving a ‘scentless courtyard of echoes’.

The writing is wonderfully atmospheric. Sarah James leads us through a ‘farm’s loose-tiled kitchen, / where the air tasted of mildew’ and Poole’s Cavern, Buxton, where ‘melted bones / drip from the roof in spikes’. Settings include Rouen, Haiti, an igloo and the Randolph Hotel.

Into the Yell has a gritty element. Sarah James unflinchingly examines lives affected by cancer, dementia, abuse, postnatal depression and bereavement. Innocent images contrast with painful scenarios. Cancer is compared to a flower ‘spreading pollen growth across my body’. Dementia is the removal of ‘layer after layer of Russian dolls’, while postnatal depression is a spell cast by a ‘bad fairy’. Rather than offering easy answers, Sarah James uses metaphor as a way of exploring these experiences in all their complexity.

Other poems have a playful tone. An Inuit spears fish with stiletto heels, flowers invade a house and a blind woman creates snow-globes from teeth, earrings, flies’ wings, hair and ash. Throughout, Sarah James’ attention to (often quirky) detail  renders the poems engaging and memorable.

Sunday at the Skin Laundrette by Kathryn Simmonds

Sunday at the Skin Laundrette by Kathryn Simmonds, paperback, pp. 62, Seren, £7.99

My first encounter with Kathryn Simmonds’ poetry was her surreal sestina ‘Saturday at the Skin Laundrette’, which won the Poetry London competition in 2006. Her debut collection focuses on the oddities of urban life: loneliness in a flat, the unreal quality of office work.

References to Christianity, usually angels, reflect the desperation of humanity. In ‘Transfiguration’, Jesus has a makeover, starts calling himself Dave and is invited to lead ‘the lonely from their stacks of DVDs’.

In this brittle world, the breaking of a television can plunge you into ‘a place beyond music or meaning’. An office worker obsesses over stationary, and staying in bed often seems the best option. ‘Five Solutions’ presents fantasies of getting caught stealing and pretending to be homeless, simply in order to reach ‘outside yourself’.

This wry humour is present throughout. After all the sarcastic comments made about contemporary art, ‘Tate Modern’ still manages to amuse:

Ladder unscalable,
screws unwearable,
cup abandoned –
oh my life!
This is the room I return to,
the room you finally tell me
is out of use
and not a piece of art.

It’s the kind of poetry Bridget Jones would write, if she had less boyfriends and a heck of a lot more talent.

Should poetry books have difficulty ratings?

Some of you are shaking your heads, muttering it would be putting poets in boxes! stereotyping! quantifying the unquantifiable! But let’s think about this. Novels are marketed by genre. Walk into a bookshop in search of a thriller or a historical novel and you’ll be able to locate it by its cover. Poetry, on the other hand, is treated as if it were a homogenous genre. You can scan the back cover for that magic word ‘accessible’, but otherwise you have little idea what you’re buying.

To make things simpler, why don’t we introduce an equivalent of the ‘heat’ ratings on packets of chilli peppers? It will go like this:

5/5 – Incomprehensible to mere mortals. Geoffrey Hill, Paul Muldoon.

4/5 – Comprehensible, but requires so much effort your thoughts are like a swarm of bees threatening to block out the sun. Philip Gross, John Burnside.

3/5 – Thought-provoking, but not to the extent you black out. Joanne Lindburg, Marilyn Francis, Kathryn Simmonds, Alice Oswald. Fiona Sampson lives between 3 and 4.

2/5 – Easy to understand, even after a hard day at work. Carol Ann Duffy.

1/5 – Pam Ayres.

Strength ratings encourage sales, after all. Look what they’ve done for dark chocolate.

From earrings to eagles: back eyes poetry

back eyes poetry, paperback, pp. 55, Earlyworks Press, £6.50

I received a copy of this delightful anthology of poetry and flash fiction for winning the Monthly Challenge on the Earlyworks Press forum.

The poetry ranges from descriptions of the natural world, including haiku, to surreal visions of contemporary life. Music, water voles, cave men, Russian oligarchs and earrings from HSamuel all make an appearance. The anthology has an advantage over similar publications in that a few poems by each poet are included, giving the reader a wider sense of each poet’s style.

In the flash fiction section, our initial assumptions are contradicted in startling ways. A description of guilt over a stabbing turns out to be about eating a chocolate cake, while a ‘talented young jeweller’ is revealed to be a child. Several flashes highlight the absurd intensity of small dilemmas. I was intrigued by a grey squirrel’s stream of consciousness, and by an eagle who aspires to blog.

A reading from an Anglesey poet: Steve Griffiths

I recently moved back to Anglesey and was fortunate enough to attend Steve Griffith’s poetry reading this morning, as part of the Beaumaris Festival.

Steve Griffiths grew up on Anglesey, at Trearddur Bay and Amlwch. He’s spent most of his adult life in London, but his poetry is full of references to Anglesey.

Many of the poems refer to local history, with an edge of darkness stemming from Griffiths’ strong sense of social justice. Other poems evoke the sea, nature and pollution. I particularly enjoyed an exhilarating poem describing a coastal gale. Poems from soon-to-be published 31 Late Love Poems and a Hole in the Head are inspired by Griffiths’ recent marriage and have a delicate, personal tone.

The reading spanned from Griffiths’ first book Anglesey Material to his latest collection about an imaginary utopia An Elusive State – Entering al-Chwm and poems from the two collections Griffiths is currently working on.

Feeling blue? Curl up with Marianne Jones

Too Blue for Logic by Marianne Jones, paperback, pp. 64, Cinnamon Press, £7.99

I’ve heard people say, ‘Cinnamon Press publish so many collections, can they be of high quality?’ Well, judging by this one, they can. Anglesey poet Marianne Jones’s debut collection is a joy to read. The book also has an attractive cover, despite two typos on the back (there are none inside).

Poems set in Japan portray an abusive relationship from which the poet finds consolation in a Zen-like appreciation of her surroundings: ‘Windows are my salvation.’ This is reflected in precise images that feel haikuesque in intensity, ‘light shining through a porcelain cup’, ‘wooden slats / on top of a bath’.

Later, poems about returning to Anglesey retain this visual clarity. They contain references to childhood memories that ‘spill like glass marbles / out of your woollen pocket’; Catholicism is recalled as ‘despair with a cross on top’.

Having lived in different parts of the world, and with the linguistic sensitivity of someone living in Wales, Marianne Jones shows an awareness of how we interpret our surroundings through language. The poems focus particularly on the relationship between language and landscape: ‘the nouns of hills, / the verbs of moonrise and sunset, / the intonation of the sea.’

And the title? You might have thought it was about depression. In fact it refers to the beauty of cornflowers sweeping axioms away. The collection leaves the reader feeling anything but blue.

N.B This review also appears on Booksy Review Forum, a site where you can read about and review small press and indie books.